


Friendship and Falling Blocks

by Code_The_Poet



Category: Tetris
Genre: Best Friends, Childhood, Friendship, Game Boy (Nintendo), Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Nostalgia, Original setting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-08
Updated: 2020-05-08
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:01:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24067798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Code_The_Poet/pseuds/Code_The_Poet
Summary: Two best friends navigate the ups and downs of childhood with the help of a Game Boy and a copy of Tetris.
Kudos: 5





	Friendship and Falling Blocks

**Author's Note:**

> This is a different sort of fanfic in that it doesn't take place in the world of the game, but rather deals with the impact of the game on someone's life. Hope you enjoy!

My parents bought me a Game Boy for my eleventh birthday. The small, greenish screen with the flickering pixels seemed like pure magic to my child self and soon accompanied me everywhere I went. My best friend Tucker didn’t understand the appeal at first, even when I tried to explain the intricacies of my favourite game, Link’s Awakening, to him. One day, however, he caught a glimpse of me playing Tetris and from the instant he saw those falling blocks he was in love.

He tried to play it cool, but I knew him well enough to see through the façade he typically wore. Where he’d previously watched me play with a mild indifference, he now leaned eagerly over my shoulder to peer at the small screen. After a few short rounds—I was never good at puzzle games—I handed him the Game Boy and urged him to try it for himself. He beat my high score on his first go.

It shouldn’t have surprised me that Tucker took to Tetris as naturally as a cat to a laser pointer; after all, our entire friendship could be traced back to a puzzle he’d helped me complete when we were both in grade three. He had watched me struggle for quite some time before quietly pointing out the missing piece, and I watched in awe as he completed the rest of the puzzle with hardly a moment of hesitation. We were both outcasts of sorts—myself because I had just moved to the city from a small town in another province and the other kids laughed at everything from my accent to my clothes, and Tucker because he was small and quiet and jumped at his own shadow—but from then on we were inseparable.

It was around the time of the Game Boy that Tucker started staying over at my house on weekends. I thought at first that he just wanted to play more Tetris, but before long I began to notice the bruises that appeared for seemingly no reason, lingering on past their expected expiry date. He shut down any attempt of mine to learn more, so I instead focused my efforts on cheering him up from his increasingly frequent periods of gloom. This meant we spent more time huddled over the Game Boy than ever, and it was after yet another midnight marathon of Tetris that we first saw the rocket ship animation the game offered as a reward for getting above a certain score. The resulting jumping and whooping woke my parents, who gently but firmly urged us to go to bed.

My parents may have been a little dismayed at how much I loved my eleventh birthday present, but that didn’t stop them from gifting me new games on special occasions and so I branched out from Tetris and Link’s Awakening. I especially loved the RPGs with fantastical stories and battles, and one peaceful little game by the name of Harvest Moon that tasked you with caring for a farm. Tucker never touched anything but Tetris, though he was content to watch the rest of my virtual pursuits over my shoulder. Some of my most cherished memories are from that time, whether it was defeating the final boss of Link’s Awakening as evening shadows gradually supplanted the golden light of a summer afternoon or passing the Game Boy and a flashlight between us as we took turns with the same old game of Tetris, hiding under the blankets on my bed to avoid discovery by my parents.

School gradually improved for me as my peers lost interest in teasing me and I learned to fit in, but it never really got better for Tucker. We learned to bypass the main halls, where the bullies would find any excuse to shove him into the lockers as they passed, and spent our lunch hours in the back stairwell to avoid the crowded cafeteria (as well as to play with the Game Boy away from the eyes of prying teachers). Neither of us were standout students, except for Tucker’s unusual knack for math class, but we both managed to stay in the grey area where praise and reprimands alike didn’t venture. Thus we spent the rest of junior high, coasting through on hastily completed assignments and a good deal of escapism in the form of the Game Boy.

The air mattress on the floor of my bedroom gradually became a permanent fixture as Tucker spent more and more time away from home. By now even my parents knew that something wasn’t quite right in his life, but since they had always believed in setting an extra plate at the table for those in need they welcomed him with open arms. He never asked for anything, but accepted their kindness with meek gratitude. Some nights, I caught him crying when he thought I was asleep. I always brought him the Game Boy when that happened, as Tetris was the only thing that seemed to calm him down. He clung to it like a child to a security blanket, finding comfort in the familiar falling blocks. I sat next to him on the air mattress while he played, trying to piece together what was wrong from the rare bits of information he was willing to relinquish, but it was like playing Tetris with only half of the blocks and so I resigned myself to comforting him as much as I was able.

High school arrived like the final dungeon of an RPG, except with none of the fun and all of the hostile creatures. The computer lab became our new refuge, full of outcasts who knew more about computers than the ones who had been hired to teach us about them. I got along with some of the others, though we were acquaintances at best and didn’t interact outside of school, but Tucker hardly said a word to anyone other than me. He sat beside me in our spot in a corner, the hood of his sweatshirt pulled far over his face in a savage defiance of the school rules, and watched me play Pokémon Red. I wasn’t the only one absorbed by Pokémon in those days and many battles were fought through the now-unwieldy link cable, but the lunch hour respites in the computer lab were all too brief compared to the tedium of school.

Along with high school came our first jobs—twin paper routes along either side of the train tracks that cut through our neighbourhood. We rose each morning at the crack of dawn and went our separate ways, eventually meeting at the other end of the line and continuing on to school. I was saving money for a Game Boy Color, enchanted by the idea of playing games in colour. Tucker was saving money to repay my parents for their kindness, but when he tried to give it to my mom she pressed it back into his hands and vaguely told him to save it for the future. The true meaning of that sentence weighed heavy in the silence that followed, but as always it went unsaid.

Soon I had a Game Boy Color, along with Super Mario Bros Deluxe. The excitement of seeing games in colour for the first time brought me back to the first time I’d laid eyes on the Game Boy that had started it all. Almost more exciting, however, was that Tucker and I were able to sit side by side and play at the same time. Gone were the days of peering over each other’s shoulder waiting for a turn to play, which I later came to miss in a nostalgic kind of way, but it was also when Tucker’s Tetris skills progressed from simply impressive to nearly inhuman. It was then that I finally convinced him to try a game other than Tetris, another puzzle game by the name of Dr. Mario that was unfortunately not Pokémon Blue (which I’d hoped he would play so that he could help me complete my Pokédex), but it was a success nonetheless.

Then one day in our grade ten year, shortly before Christmas, a police officer appeared at our door looking for Tucker. His dad had been arrested and was going to jail, his mom was moving to an apartment in the next province over, and he was to accompany her. He pleaded with them to let him stay, and there were tears in all of our eyes when he said it was the only place he’d ever felt at home, but he was to leave in the morning and there was no way around it. I helped him pack a pitifully small bag of his few possessions, along with a larger one of my old clothes and other things my mom wanted him to have.

That night there were relatively few tears, for we were determined to make the best of our last night together. We played Tetris into the early hours of the morning, and Tucker got his highest score yet before we both fell asleep on my bed like we used to when we were younger. The Game Boys were still chirping out their chiptune soundtracks when my mom came to wake us, all too early it seemed. I helped Tucker load his bags into the taxi out front, and when it came time to say goodbye I pushed the original Game Boy (loaded with the same old Tetris and a fresh set of batteries) into his hands. He tried to protest, but I told him it was an early Christmas present and that he’d need it where he was going. He cried on my shoulder until the taxi driver threatened to leave without him.

With Tucker gone, the empty space on my bedroom floor where he’d slept more often than not felt as empty as the void within me. I moped around the house rather than sit in my room alone, the Game Boy Color gathering dust on a side table as even it couldn’t ease the pain I felt. Once I had thought it the source of my greatest joy, but now it was clear that it hadn’t been the games that I had enjoyed all this time.

Tucker and I spoke on the phone from time to time, but he had never been one for words. At first I was content to talk his ear off, the only sound from his end the endless chirping of the Game Boy, but eventually even that lost its appeal and the phone calls grew more infrequent. My parents, concerned at my lackluster demeanor, tried to cheer me up with the gift of a new game, but it sat on my bedside table with the plastic still on.

Thus passed the next few months, and the dark loneliness of winter melted into a damp and gloomy spring. I no longer played Pokémon in the computer lab at lunchtime, preferring to mope in the library where even the other outcasts didn’t venture. My grades took a nosedive as well, dropping from the “acceptable” range to the “in danger of failing” range. I couldn’t bring myself to care; it was easier to feel only numbness.

Then one evening, Tucker called again. He was strangely talkative, asking a string of questions about my life. I struggled to provide more than vague answers, not wanting him to know that something was wrong, but eventually he grew so frustrated that he raised his voice at me for the first time ever. My mom had called, he said, and she was beside herself with worry. It was then that I broke down, choking out the entire story between sobs, and even the Game Boy on Tucker’s end fell silent as he listened. When I had finally finished, he spoke up in his usual quiet voice and told me there was something he wanted me to do.

It was on Tucker’s orders that I found myself at the game store after school the next day, asking for a copy of Tetris. The clerk tried to convince me to buy the new Game Boy Color version, but I insisted on the old one. This was stupid, I thought, back at home digging through the junk drawer in the kitchen in search of new batteries. But the moment I blew the dust off the screen of the Game Boy Color and slotted in the cartridge with a satisfying click, I felt a great weight lift from my chest. The phone rang shortly after, as Tucker had promised it would, and we played and talked just like we had not so long ago.

Just like that, the game that had captured our attention so long ago became the thread that connected us across a distance greater than either of us had ever anticipated. Gone were the nights where we huddled under the covers with the Game Boy and a flashlight, but the heartfelt conversations over cheerful chiptunes remained. We laughed and compared high scores just like old times, and just like old times Tucker’s were always higher. Armed with Tetris and the Game Boy Color, school (and, by extension, life) became bearable for me once again. For amidst endless falling blocks and tiny flickering screens, I found what had always been most important to me: my best friend in the entire world, no matter the distance.


End file.
